Biomedicine on Display

Here is the announcement for International Society for Intellectual History’s conference “Museum Narratives and Representations”, to be held 6-8 October, 2006 at the School of Architecture, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

Museum Narratives and Representations
The aim of this international conference is to explore the institution of the museum, as well as the concept of the museum in space and time, as:

• a key intellectual device of the Enlightenment,
• a powerful political tool of the modern nation state,
• a rapidly growing industry today
• a complex analytical field.

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Seminar: Access and audiences: Reaching out with medical and healthcare collections
Tuesday 18 October April 2005, 4.30 - 6.30 pm
Thackray Museum, Leeds http://www.thackraymuseum.org
Speakers: Rachel Bairsto, British Dental Association; Dawn Kemp, Royal College of Surgeons, Edinburgh; Fiona Elliott, Thackray Museum. Commentator: Emm Barnes, University of Manchester, Centre for HSTM
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Program for efterårets seminarrække ved Biocampus. Invitation til BioCampus Netværksmøder: Continue Reading »

De kulturhistoriske museers faglige årsmøde bliver afholdt igen i år i Fuglsø, den 16. - 18. november. Mødet består dels af et officielt årsmøde, hvor foreningen vælger bestyrelse, aflægge årsberetning m.v. Dels er der møde i museumsinspekørernes forskellige faglige grupperinger, dvs. arkæologerne har deres halvdagssessioner, nyere tids inspektører deres, konservatorerne deres etc. Mødet er uden sammenligning det vigtigste for de kulturhistoriske museer. Deltagelsen favner bredt, og det er her, alle vigtige officielle og uofficielle informationer inden for de kulturhistoriske museer får rum til at cirkulere. Ion, Frank, Anders og jeg vil gerne deltage. Det fulde program kan ses under Organisationen Danske Museer, som afholder mødet; http://www.dkmuseer.dk/

Netværket holder møde i Hillerød 3. - 4. oktober 2005. Museologisk netværk er et netværk oprettet for snart en del år siden. Sigtet er at fremme museologien i Danmark. Continue Reading »

The patient is a central category of recent (bio)medicine — this symposium focuses on the fragile patient, the patient as an object of biomedical science and industrialized care:

The Patient: A Symposium, Bucknell University, October 18 & 19, 2006

Precariously situated between home and hospital, work and bed, life and death, the patient occupies a liminal, unstable position. Charged to identify with her state as with the moral virtue from which she receives her name, the patient also lives in the fear of our indifference and impatience. Although attended by doctors, nurses, family and friends, her condition - particularly if it is chronic - ever threatens to sever her connections with the world and to exile her into that fundamental solitude owned by the sick and suffering.

Immersed within a society and medical system that seeks optimum outcomes linked to zero errors, the patient receives care delivered with industrial efficiency. Advances in diagnostic and therapeutic modalities provide both cure and control of chronic illness not imagined a decade ago. Poised to benefit on multiple fronts, she should be increasingly satisfied with the medical encounter; and yet, many patients feel alienated or even violated by the efficiency of the medical system. What defines a quality medical encounter from her perspective? What do medical practitioners - nurses, physicians, social workers - value in their relationship with the patient? How is this relationship preserved and nurtured? What are the opportunities or perils in the physician-patient relationship? Continue Reading »

Things are happening in the field of historiography that may have interesting consequences for the way we conceptualise the “representation” of recent biomedicine in a museum context, e.g., this conference:

Presence: A viable alternative to representation?
An international conference at Groningen University, The Netherlands Center for Metahistory Groningen (CMG), December 1 & 2, 2005

For more than thirty years now, thinking about the way we, humans, account for our past, has stood under the aegis of representationalism. In its first two decades, representationalism, inaugurated by Hayden White’s Metahistory of 1973, has been remarkably successful in questioning the realist assumptions in historiography. By now, however, it has lost much of its vigour and productivity, especially when faced with some of the more significant phenomena of the last decades’ dealings with the past (memory, lieux de mémoire, remembrance, trauma).

There are signs, however, that a new paradigm is emerging. We have boldly given a name to this emerging paradigm, we call it ‘presence’. Continue Reading »

Invitation and call for 1st annual symposium of the DK-UK Postgraduate Forum on Bio-studies: Current issues in bio-studies and society, 17th-18th November 2005, London School of Economics and Political Sciences, UK

This event will be the first meeting of the newly founded DK-UK Postgraduate Forum on Bio-studies. In both the United Kingdom and in Denmark, interest in the social, legal and ethical implications of developments in the biosciences has never been greater, as reflected in initiatives such as BioCampus at University of Copenhagen, BIOS at LSE, “Danish Biomedicine 1955-2005″ at Medical Museion, the ESRC Genomics Network and many others.

The aim of this symposium is to focus on current issues in bio-studies in a cross cultural context in order to generate research initiatives and networking between the participants. The main themes to be explored will be Continue Reading »

Invitation from Lene Koch to the Medical Museion -group:

What: Stem cell group meets Nik Brown and Helen Busby
Where: Sofastuen, Panuminstituttet Blegdamsvej 3, 2200 N
When: September 27. 9.30 - 17 Continue Reading »